


let me down gently

by perfectpro



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 34 Days Challenge, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 03:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7205039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re never going to be the same carefree best friends that they once were, and Kent’s getting around to accepting that. Things are good, now, but they’re not the same, and that’s okay. He's getting used to it.</p>
<p>They’re better than they’ve been in years, and that’s really all that he can hope for, but sometimes Kent remembers all the texts he sent at 2 am and all the responses he never got.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let me down gently

**Author's Note:**

> Written for week four of the 34 Days Challenge, for the future portion of The Future/Post Canon.
> 
> Title comes from "Dance Music" by The Mountain Goats, because so much it hits Jack and Kent's relationship right on the nose. _I'm 17 years old/and you're the last, best thing I've got going/but then the special secret sickness starts to eat through you/what am I supposed to do_ and _there's only one place this road ever ends/and I don't want to die alone_.

Jack signs to the Providence Falconers, and it’s six years later than either of them thought he’d join the NHL, but Kent is so proud that he tears up reading the article. He calls Jack that night, and Jack answers. He’s not sure who’s more surprised. 

“You fucking made it, Zimms,” Kent says, because he can’t believe it. There were hours where he didn’t think it would ever happen, hours where he didn’t know if Jack would make it to the next day, but’s been six years and he’s made it. If Kent sounds choked up about it, it’s because his signal has been funky for a while.

Jack laughs, hoarse and pleased and a little proud, and he deserves it. He deserves to be proud of himself, and Kent’s never going to be over the fact that he’s going to play against Jack Zimmermann again one day. One day he might even get to play with him. “Guess I did, Kenny.”

They don’t talk for much longer, but Kent chirps him about not asking for more in terms of contract, and Jack doesn’t even get offended. He’s sorry about the comment, but mostly he’s surprised that Jack doesn’t taken offense. 

Kent really shouldn’t be that surprised that Jack’s changed. There are six years of Jack Zimmermann that he doesn’t know, a Jack who was working through a world without Kent. Kent had to work through a world without Jack, but he shouldn’t have had to. It stings more than he’s willing to admit.

-x-

They talk occasionally, and it’s not like it used to be, but Kent’s accepted that they’re never going to get back to how that was. When he looks in Jack’s eyes and finds them active and alert instead of cloudy and slow, he’s even thankful for it. Still, he can’t help but miss Jack and the way they used to be. Sometimes it’s hard to accept that things are better this way.

“We’re playing the Bruins end of next month, let’s hang out,” Kent suggests, glancing at his calendar to make sure he’s got the dates right. He’ll have to check his email for the flight times, but there’s an optional skate the day after the game so they don’t have to be in a rush.

He always goes to optional skates, but he can make an exception for Jack. It’s not a big deal.

On the other end of the line, in Providence, Jack hums. “Yeah, sounds good. I’ve got practice the next day, but I can make the game and we’ll do dinner after,” he negotiates, and if Kent knows anything it’s that Jack’s writing the game on his planner, because Jack keeps a planner for meetings and plays and notes about teammates’ strengths and weaknesses. Kent would say it’s great organizational skills that make good captains, but he looks around the mess of his apartment and feels like that’s not the only thing that makes for good captains.

-x-

Jack meets him outside of the locker room after the game, and the first thing he tells Kent is, “Your slapshot’s going wide.”

Kent smiles, reaches out and pulls Jack in for a hug. “You fucker,” he says, but it’s fond. “And I’m leading the league in terms of points, so unless you want to put your money where your mouth is, you’d better shut up.” He hikes his bag up his shoulder to make it more comfortable and nods at some of his teammates who trickle out.

“Parser, we’re heading to a few bars. You in?” one of them asks, nodding towards Jack with curiosity.

Kent throws an arm around Jack’s shoulders – which is harder to do than he remembers, because Jack’s shoulders have gotten almost impossibly wider – and shakes his head. “Nah, Zimms and I are hanging out. I’ll see you back at the hotel,” he calls, pulling Jack along with him. He pauses and asks, “You didn’t want to go, did you?”

Shaking his head, Jack huffs a laugh. “And get chirped about our loss to the Schooners yesterday? I can think of better things to do on a Friday night.”

As a matter of fact, so can Kent, which is how they end up driving around Boston looking for a place to eat instead. Their taste in food never lines up, and Kent is pretty sure they’ve made a full lap around the city. Jack doesn’t like cilantro, so Mexican is out. Kent is allergic to tomatoes, so they don’t go near Italian. And Jack loves Chinese, but Kent’s not in the mood for it tonight, so they pass on those too. They wind up at a German restaurant that smells of sausage and sauerkraut, and Kent’s mouth is watering by the time they’re seated.

He goes through the beer menu and finds something that he’s sure he butchers the pronunciation of, but the waitress gets it down anyway and turns to Jack, who orders a water. Left alone, Kent realizes that they haven’t really been alone since the party he interrupted at Samwell, and look how that turned out.

“Good game, Parse. Really,” Jack says, and Kent lets himself relax.

-x-

They see each other’s games when they can, and Kent’s there screaming bloody murder with the rest of the crowd when Jack gets checked in a way that has to be illegal, no two ways about it. Jack gets up, but he’s wobbly on his skates, and medics escort him off the ice.

Kent is out of his seat before he can even hear the refs announce the penalty, squeezing his way down the aisle and moving towards Jack. And he’s overreacting, he tells himself, Jack didn’t hit his head on the ice, but maybe he did and Kent didn’t see. It happened on the other side of the ice, so it could be that it hit and Kent didn’t notice, but the thought makes him nauseated and he speeds up.

Jack’s been taken to the hospital, they think he might have a concussion. “A mild one,” they explain to him, and they elaborate that they’re not even sure, but it doesn’t exactly make Kent feel any better.

Kent has had his fair share of injuries after playing for as long as he has, but all he can think about is the fact that the last time he saw Jack get hurt on the ice they were sixteen and Jack sprained his ankle. They’d been doing something stupid, fucking around after practice, and Jack had gone down and Kent had driven them to the hospital, chirping him relentlessly all the way. Concussions are different matters of business, though.

When Kent is finally let into Jack’s room, Jack is staring at the ceiling and he’s wearing a white hospital gown and Kent is going to throw up. He pushes down memories from six years ago and raps on the doorframe, waiting until Jack’s noticed him before walking in.

“Hard hit, huh?” he asks, like he doesn’t know that it was hard hit, like he wasn’t trying to keep himself together on the drive to the hospital.  
Jack forces a kind of smile and asks, “Did we win?”

Kent tugs the back of his snapback lower and holds out his phone, displaying the final score, 4-2. “Sure did. Maybe next time try to move out of the way if you noticed a lineman weighing 280 heading your way, though. I didn’t take physics, but I’m pretty sure mass has a factor in determining force,” he jokes, and to his relief Jack cracks a smile that’s a little less forced.

“There’s a chance I could be out for the next few games. They still think I could have a concussion, but I feel fine,” Jack informs him, reaching over and checking his own phone next to the hospital bed, which has been buzzing incessantly. “The Samwell team,” he explains, scrolling through messages.

“Better let them know you’re still alive,” Kent says, checking his own phone. There’s just two unread texts from the last time he looked, and both of them are from teammates asking if he’d been watching the Falconers game when Jack got hit. He responds fairly quickly, _yeah damn that hit looked nasty_. He doesn’t think his team knows that he sees Jack as often as he does, and for a moment he wonders if Jack’s team knows that they see each other sometimes.

Finally setting his phone aside, Jack rolls his eyes and then looks at the hospital bracelet he’s been tagged with. “I know I haven’t been discharged yet,” he starts, “but do you want to get out of here and get ice cream?”

It sounds like a great idea, but better safe than sorry. “Sure you feel fine?” he asks, because he’s not going to be the one responsible for Jack not treating a concussion right. Jack nods, and Kent pulls out a pocket knife with a grin that’s mirrored on Jack’s face, a grin they’ve shared a thousand times between games of beer pong and in the aftermath of championships and no-look passes. “My flight leaves in four hours, so we’d better get going.”

They get Jack’s hospital bracelet off, and Kent shoves his Aces snapback on him and takes a picture for proof. In the photo, Jack is grinning, the Aces logo clearly visible because he’d put up a fight when Kent had flipped it backwards. With Jack back in regular clothes instead of the uniform he’d come in with, it’s about as good of a disguise as they’re going to get.

Somehow, no one notices their escape, and Kent drives through traffic with Jack by his side, and the weight that settled when Jack got checked gets a little lighter every time Jack laughs.

Jack’s phone rings to the point where Jack has to put it on silent, and Kent guesses that someone noticed that he went missing from his own hospital room. “The PR team is going to be pissed,” Jack says, but he doesn’t sound like he cares too much. “I haven’t done something this stupid since Samwell.”

“You did something as stupid as breaking out of a hospital when you might have a concussion at Samwell?” Kent laughs, and he gives Jack’s old team a little more credit.  
With a laugh, Jack shakes his head. “Now that you mention it… I haven’t done something this stupid since we borrowed my mom’s car to drive to Ottawa. Do you remember that drive?” he asks, like maybe Kent forgot the time that they were seventeen and stupid beyond all compare.

“I remember your dad grounding us for six months,” Kent tells him, because there’s a memory he’s never going to forget: Bad Bob screaming at him and Jack on the sidewalk in Ottaway, a vein protruding threateningly from his neck. It was then that he understood all the terror that Jack’s dad could have produced in the opposing team with a reputation for dropping his gloves.

Jack reaches over and shoves Kent’s shoulder good naturedly. “He only grounded _me_ for six months; you just got yelled at. Plus, my mom still won’t let me borrow her car when I go home – she always mentions being worried I’d wind up in Ottawa.”

“I was basically grounded, too. It’s not like I liked hanging out with the rest of the guys without you,” Kent says, glancing over to where Jack’s almost grinning as he looks out the windshield.

That night, when Kent is back in Las Vegas, Jack forwards the email the PR team sends him. It includes phrases such as “endangering yourself” and other things that Kent saw coming a mile away, and Kent just attaches a picture he took at the ice cream place. It’s nothing special, just Jack wearing a smile that doesn’t look as forced as it used to, reaching up to run a hand through helmet hair, squinting into the sunlight to look at the camera.

_Hope it was worth it_ , he adds beneath it, and sends it before he can overthink it. 

Jack responds within the hour, presumably after handling more PR things, and he only writes, _We’ll do it again._

Along with that, he sends a picture of his own, and Kent’s really been paying too much attention to Jack’s Instagram because it looks like a shot that’s so stereotypically Jack. It’s their ice cream cones next to each other, Kent’s rocky road dribbling down the cone and onto his hand, Jack’s butter pecan next to it. Kent doesn’t reply, but he does save the picture. Just for safekeeping.

-x-

Here’s the thing. Kent wants to come out, and he knows that he could. He’s captain of the Las Vegas Aces, has lead them to conference championships and Stanley Cups, so it would matter. He’s not a rookie who could get swept under the rug after the announcement, he’s a big enough name that people are going to notice and it’s going to make an impact.

His agent knows. It’s something they went over when she first became his agent, because she’d asked him if he had anything that would put him at risk of scandals. He told her he was bisexual, and she asked if any of the men he’d slept with might come forward about it.

Thinking of Jack, the only guy he’d ever slept with at that point, Kent shook his head and they’d moved on.

So what’s stopping him isn’t that his agent thinks it’s a bad career move, because she told him that he could handle the aftermath. He’s an important player, he has a Calder and three Art Ross trophies. His career isn’t going anywhere, she assures him, and he knows she’s right.

All he can think about is that if he comes out, everything from 2009 is going to get brought up again. It’s Jack’s first year in the league, and Kent can’t subject him to those rumors again. Not when they’re working on being friends again, not when news anchors might speculate as to whether there’s more between them.

There used to be, but not anymore. Kent’s too thankful that Jack is willing to see him to risk fucking it up again.

And he can’t tell Jack about wanting to come out, because Jack would tell him to. Jack would say it doesn’t matter for a first year rookie to go through that, because Kent’s been dealing with it for years and it’s not fair to ask him to keep closeted just so the press will lay off Jack. Not that the press have ever gone easy on Jack, Kent knows. Kent just can’t do that to his friend.

-x-

Sometimes it’s hard not to be mad at Jack, when Kent remembers 2009 and the aftermath. He and Jack had been inseparable until they weren’t, and then Jack was in rehab and Kent was drafted and spending every moment not on the ice calling Jack and praying to a God he hasn’t believed in since middle school that someone would pick up.

Jack never picked up and Kent had to find out from tabloids that Jack had left rehab just in time to be home for Christmas. There are photos everywhere of Jack with puffy hair tucked under Bad Bob’s arm as they walk from the facility to the car, and Kent still gets nauseated when he thinks about standing in line at the supermarket on Christmas Eve, his best friend’s flat eyes staring back at him.

After Jack left rehab, Kent had gone back to calling him pretty regularly. Once a day, more on the weekends when he’d been drinking. Bob Zimmermann had answered sometime in February, maybe Valentine’s Day, and it’s the irony that Kent enjoys the most about that situation. Bob gave Kent his and Alicia’s phone numbers and then stated with an air of finality that he shouldn’t call Jack again.

It’s hard to remember that, because the feeling doesn’t go away. It’s a wound that never healed, and when Jack was at Samwell and Kent was in Vegas, he’d feel the need to pick up the phone and call Jack. _Does it feel like this for you, too? Like it’s always fresh, just waiting to bleed again?_

Secretly, even if he’s never really admitted it to himself, he thinks he understands why Jack never called back, never picked up in the first place. Because maybe Jack thought that it would always feel like this, and maybe he thought it’d just be easiest to get used to it instead of going back to how things were.

They can’t go back to how things were, because things can never be that way again. They’re never going to be the same carefree best friends that they once were, and Kent’s getting around to accepting that. Things are good, now, but they’re not the same, and that’s okay.

They’re better than they’ve been in years, and that’s really all that he can hope for, but sometimes Kent remembers all the texts he sent at 2am and all the responses he never got.

The image of Jack, unconscious with an oxygen mask on, being wheeled from the ambulance into the hospital, is still burned onto his eyelids. He’s dreamed about it so often that he doesn’t know if it can be classified as a nightmare anymore. At some point, he thinks, people just get used to these things.

He doesn’t tell Jack about the dreams, or the nightmares, or whatever they are. Kent figures that Jack probably has enough demons on his own.

They’re over it, they’ve moved past it, or at least Jack has. Kent can convince himself that, for the most part, he hasn’t suffered too much lasting damage from the aftermath of the overdose. And if memories of his rookie year are a blur of waiting for Jack to call him back and curled up with a newfound cat hoping that he doesn’t fuck up everything that he touches, well, that’s on him. 

Anyway, it’s not Jack’s fault that Kent feels this way. He’s been to therapy – the mandated kind, because his mother wasn’t going to let him not talk about it with someone after finding his best friend unconscious in the bathroom. He’s been to therapy, and the hurt that Jack may have inflicted on other people was all unintentional, and he’s kind of accepted it even if moving past it is a different thing. But Kent’s still hurt, and while it might not be Jack’s fault, it’s certainly not his own, and he’d like to have someone to blame for it instead of just having another unresolved conflict.

-x-

Kent’s cat is an asshole. It is, quite possibly, Kent’s favorite thing about Kit, the fact that she’s rude to pretty much everyone.

He’s not the only one who thinks so, because the Aces have all been over to his apartment for after game celebrations and things, and Jeff was the one to point it out. Holding out his hand, bleeding from two defined holes that can only be Kit’s fangs, Jeff stared at Kent flatly. “Your cat is an asshole, Parse.”

Nuzzling Kit close and smirking at how he’s the only one she tolerates, Kent hummed. “She takes after me that way,” he stated proudly, only growing more smug at the deepening frown on Jeff’s face.

Kit hates everyone and tolerates Kent. It wasn’t like that’s the kind of cat he wanted to adopt, but a tiny kitten walked out of an alley on his way home and yelled at him until he picked her up. So maybe he wasn’t exactly looking to adopt a cat, but Kit was a cat looking to get adopted, and she got what she wanted. She usually does.

The first time that Jack meets Kit, Kent is expecting for her to waltz up and stand in front of him until he’s petted her a sufficient amount and then leave. It’s kind of become her protocol for newcomers, but this time she doesn’t leave. Jack squats on the floor, petting her and talking about something that Kent isn’t even trying to pay attention to, because is this really his cat? Was she replaced during the last roadie? Maybe something went wrong with the girl down the hall who was supposed to come over twice a day to feed and entertain Kit.

“Kent?” Jack asks, arching an eyebrow, stroking Kit’s chin as she stands in front of him, starting to purr.

Kent snaps out of it and opens the fridge, noticing how Kit immediately abandons Jack to stand next to her bowl the way she’s been doing for three years. It reassures him a little bit that maybe this is still his cat. “Yeah?” he responds, fishing around in a drawer until he finds the cheese he was looking for.

“I was asking about – you’re, uh, getting that for the cat?” Jack asks, gaping as Kent breaks off a portion and puts it in Kit’s bowl, only to put the rest back in the fridge, pulling out two beers.

“I ran out of the chicken that she usually eats. Cheese is fine for cats, man,” Kent explains, smirking as Kit winds her way around his legs in thanks before making her way to the cheese. 

Jack rolls his eyes and accepts a beer, walking to the living room and putting on ESPN before relaxing on the couch. Kent hesitates when he sees it, because it’s the first time that Jack’s ever been to his apartment and he already looks at home. 

It’s something that he instantly wishes he could un-think. There’s a lot of that, in terms of Jack, and Kent only sometimes can’t believe that he’s stupid enough to think that they might eventually be able to get back on track. Most of the time, he’s just grateful that they’re finally talking again. Hesitating by the doorway, Kent takes a drink from his beer and tries to ignore the fact getting over Jack Zimmerman is apparently a one step forward, two steps back process.

Kit wanders through the room, distracting them both by jumping onto the couch and arranging herself in Jack’s lap.

“Seriously? Do have you have catnip in your cologne?” Kent demands, glaring at where his cat is ignoring him. He honestly wouldn’t put it past Zimms, stuffing catnip in his pockets to impress the cat and piss Kent off. It’s something he would have done in the Q. Kent has no idea whether Jack would do that now, which stings in a way that he doesn’t know quite what to do with.

Jack looks up, innocently asking, “Do she not act like this with everyone?” As if he doesn’t know, the bastard.

Kent rolls his eyes, snapping a picture of the two and uploading it to Kit Purrson’s Instagram account with only the slightest moment’s hesitation about the caption. _An afternoon with my second favorite hockey star._

Scoffing, Kent sits on the other end of the couch, kicking his feet up and smirking when Kit puts one paw on his ankle. “It’s like she thinks you’re special or something,” he sniffs, trying to sound more offended than he feels. Judging by the soft smile that creeps onto Jack’s face, he isn’t sure that he succeeds. Somehow, he can’t bring himself to mind too much.

-x-

The thing about them is that they’re never going to be able to brush each other off. Kent’s listened to his mom talk about first loves before, and she says that you move past them eventually. That may be true for first loves, but he doesn’t really know. He and Jack were so much more than that, and thinking back to that last summer is like watching a film with water damage. The scenes don’t play the way they used to.

Before that last year, everything was perfect. Or maybe it wasn’t and he didn’t know. Maybe the last year is when it became obvious and he had to notice it, but he should have noticed it before. Kent tries not to think about that, because the last time he thought too hard about it he was twenty two and made a drunk dial to Jack at 1 am Vegas time, 4 am at Samwell. 

Just like all the times before then, Jack didn’t call back. Kent tries really hard to not blame him for that.

Before that year, they were just two kids, best friends who loved hockey and each other. Kent thought they loved each other, at least, but he’s grown enough as a person by now to admit that it may have been one sided.

Somewhere out there, there is an interview from when he was first drafted by the Aces. The black on the jersey washes his skin out to the point of being nearly translucent, and he answers every question smoothly. He even smiles at the reporters, at least that’s what everyone says. Kent watched the interview exactly once and looked at his shell-shocked expression and robotic responses for all of thirty seconds before he couldn’t handle it any more. He doesn’t remember giving the interview, can barely remember actually being drafted. Most of what stands out to him about that day is that it was the day that Jack’s voicemail filled and he wasn’t able to leave messages anymore. Wasn’t even able to hear Jack’s voice.

That came after, though. After Kent had found his best friend passed out in the bathroom with pills scattered around him. After they’d won the Memorial Cup and Kent thought they were on top of the world with nowhere to go but up. After a year of Jack staring at reporters with dead eyes and unfeeling responses to their questions. After too many parties to count, after practices that leave them drained, after they’ve given everything they have and then some. After, after, after.

After their first kiss after practice, on center ice when Jack took his helmet off and Kent couldn’t stand the burning feeling in the pit of his stomach any longer. Jack’s intake of breath and then too much teeth and not enough finesse, and it wasn’t perfect by a long shot but it was theirs.

And now it’s a decade later, and Kent really could kill himself because he’s always know he’s someone who doesn’t learn his lesson the first time around, but he didn’t think he was think much of a glutton for punishment. Because Jack Zimmermann is a drug he just can’t quit, and maybe he’s the one who will be going to rehab this time around.

-x-

It’s another two months before he can really admit it to himself, that he’s developed another stupid crush on Jack Zimmermann, whose idea of a good time is watching history documentaries on Netflix and getting to bed by ten so he can be up for an early practice. Kent has no idea if his taste in guys is terrible as a whole or if Jack is just the outlier that keeps popping up. It’d help if he’d ever felt like this about someone else, but Jack is different, he always has been.

Even after he’s gotten comfortable with it, his name is Kent Parson and he likes a guy that he doesn’t know he can love without hurting, even then, it’s another month before he can wrap his head around it. Because all this time that they’ve been figuring out what semblance of normal is good for them, Kent’s been falling head over heels.

He feels eighteen and stupid all over again, and maybe that’s why he does it.

The next time he sees Jack, it’s in Providence. Aces went 4-3 against the Falconers, thanks to a swipe that Kent got in a minute before the period ended. And Jack’s not even mad, so Kent buys beer and rides back to Jack’s place after the game. He’s got a flight out in the early afternoon, so he doesn’t have to worry about being up too early, and the win hums through his veins, getting tangled up with the feeling of nervous excitement that comes from being around Jack.

Jack’s apartment is sparsely but tastefully decorated, and the look screams Alicia Zimmermann from the first moment that the door swings open. The kitchen maybe a little less so, but Kent can’t really say he’s surprised. Playing professional hockey means that takeout isn’t exactly a viable option for dinner anymore, and cooking is easier than scouring through restaurant menus for something his nutritionist won’t hate.

They end up on the couch, watching some trash TV that Kent’s managed to commandeer the remote for. The Kardashians are arguing onscreen, Kent is feeling pleasantly buzzed and Jack must be too if the way he’s given up lobbying for the History Channel is any indication.

Kent honestly cannot believe how lucky he is. He and Jack are still mildly tangled together from Jack’s last attempt of turning off MTV and his heat is comforting in a way that’s almost familiar. It feels like how it used to, when they’d get back from games in the Q and neither of them were tired yet or could think about sleep. They’d put the TV on as background noise and stay up talking, anything to feel like the night would never end.

That’s what it feels like to Kent, at least. He turns to Jack to say something about it, ask if he remembers those nights where they’d watch the clock radio in the hotel tick towards the early hours of the morning as infomercial replaced infomercial on the TV screen. Twisting slightly, Kent leans over to ask and realizes how close they are.

Jack’s only a few inches away from him, blinking slowly, and that’s familiar as well. Kent is sixteen and twenty six all at once all over again, and his breath hitches when knows what’s coming. It’s not even a decision, really, just this pull that’s been building up between them for who knows how long.

For a moment, their lips meet and Kent remembers what it was like to feel whole. Then Jack jerks underneath him and pulls away suddenly, eyes wide and unfocused.

“I’m dating someone,” Jack says, the sheer panic on his face giving way to a kind of resigned determination. Kent closes his eyes and tries to tell him that he really can’t have expected for things to work out any other way. 

Unwilling, Kent thinks of the party at Samwell where he’d found Jack posing for a selfie with a short, blond kid. He snorts, because God has a sense of humor and Jack Zimmermann has a type. “Good for you,” he mutters, leaning away as Jack cringes from the contact between them. Kent remembers so many parties, pulling Jack away from unwanted contact, but now it’s him. He does the same thing that he’s always done, gets Jack away from it as fast as possible, and releases Jack’s hand. The space doesn’t help him, but Jack relaxes for a fraction of a second.

They sit, and Jack rubs his hand self-consciously, like he can still feel where Kent touched him. Good, Kent thinks, because he doesn’t want to be the only one hurt. And at least Jack feels something, can’t just brush this off.

“He reminds me of you, sometimes,” Jack starts, tentatively, and Kent is about to ask if that’s supposed to make him feel better or worse when he continues, “Just less tortured.”

And Kent knows that Jack doesn’t mean that as an insult, just as a statement. If he meant it as an insult, it would have been more cutting, but Kent doesn’t know a way to dull words as sharp as that. Maybe there isn’t, maybe Jack means it as the barbed wire that it feels like, and maybe the hurt is intentional.

Kent nods, looks away, lets them stew in silence. It’s not fair for Jack to say things like that, and it’s not fair for Kent to listen to them. Kent shouldn’t feel like he can’t fight back, but it’s Jack. Kent hasn’t fought back in years. He doesn’t know if he ever will.

The words weigh heavy, though, and he’s so tempted to bring up the past. Doesn’t want to admit that Jack is the last, best thing he’s got going, and the ages of seventeen and eighteen shouldn’t have felt the way that they did but it happened and there’s no moving past it.

It’s not like he’d be the way he is if his best friend hadn’t tried to commit suicide, heart stopping for a minute while Kent sat beside him in the ambulance, frozen in terror.

That was years ago, though, and he’s as over it as he’s ever going to be, even if he still has nightmares sometimes. 

Twisting to get a good view of Jack, Kent thins his lips and resolutely does not think of Bob Zimmermann’s voice over the phone, asking him to stop calling. “If you don’t like me tortured, Zimms, maybe you shouldn’t have made me that way,” he tells him, snatching his keys from the end table and letting the door slam behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> Just so everyone knows, I don't really think that Jack wouldn't tell Kent about Bitty. For the purposes of this fic, though, that's what happened. I took some artistic liscense.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://helpless-in-sleep.tumblr.com/) and post tons of _Check, Please!_ so feel free to swing by.


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